The Need For Spiritual Communities and How to Start Them by Swami Kriyananda

Author:Swami Kriyananda [Kriyananda, Swami]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781565895553
Google: FcAyEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Crystal Clarity Publishers
Published: 2016-09-15T04:09:44+00:00

Chapter ElevenWHAT IS ANANDA?

The reader has already been informed that an actual experiment in cooperative living, known as Ananda World Brotherhood Village, is being carried out by the author and some of his friends in the mountains of Northern California on the basis of the ideas presented in this book.6 The reader may ask himself, “Why go to all the trouble of starting something myself, when there is a community already flourishing that I might join?”

As a matter of fact, we might be happy for you to reach this conclusion. But please bear in mind that communities, like people, develop distinct characters of their own. To live in a place with a different character from yours might impede your development, even though its essential goals and yours be the same. Many are the roads to truth, and many and varied are the possible applications of broad principles, such as those which have been outlined in these pages.

Ananda presents one such application. Not everyone who reads this book and is attracted to its ideas will feel similarly attracted to the communities I have founded. This is quite as it should be. The world would be a very dull place indeed if everyone liked and did the same things. The most universal principles must lose some of their universality in actual application, for every such application can only be a limited example of the principle itself. Other, and perhaps very different, applications might exemplify it just as truly.

Ananda is a yoga-oriented community. It is dedicated to the search for God and to serving Him through hard, self-purifying work. Our members are disciples, or at least devotees, of Paramhansa Yogananda and of his line of gurus. Most of them are members also of Self-Realization Fellowship, the organization which Yogananda started in this country in 1920. Ananda is not, however, formally affiliated with that or with any other organization.

When Paramhansa Yogananda, during his public lectures in the last years of his life, urged his listeners to band together into “world brotherhood colonies,” the general expectation was that his own organization would take the first steps towards forming such a community. But Yogananda was urging his listeners themselves to take the initiative. His organization had, and is likely to continue to have, more than it can do already to serve the spiritual demands that are placed upon it by a worldwide and growing interest in yoga. For a community to be successful it is vitally necessary in any case that it run itself; it cannot be supervised effectively from a distance. Its problems will be immediate; they can be solved only by painstaking experiment, not by the remote directives of some larger, but less directly involved, institution.

Ananda is, therefore, completely autonomous.7

We are not sectarian in our dealings with the general public, but we find it helpful in our own home environment for our members to be following the same path together.

And what is this path? A few of its highlights are:

A belief in the essential oneness of all religions, and a universal respect for their teachings.

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